Trouble with wood farming

[NeuroPandas]

Hey all, hopefully someone can help me with this. Bit of overview, my 4 villages are set up with 33 villagers in total. I have been reworking their jobs and making everything more efficient, or so I thought. Even as far as creating a spreadsheet to verify material uses etc are correctly counted without any bonuses.

Anyway, I've noticed for a while that my wood always seemed to be getting used at a bigger rate as the game went on. Not because of population or requirements per season (Ive watched them to check) It's more like my wood just vanishes and gets used up no matter what I do.

So this past season after adjusting the whole working structure I made it so that every category was a net positive except for spirit (I ran out of time to finish that) and when the season passed my villagers were all angry, I had no wood supplies even though my math said I should have had at least 150 logs left not including more planks and firewood and nothing seemed to get crafted as far as food and sake.

When I started the game I dont remember the resources being so volatile and often had dozens of logs in my chest between seasons. I get that a bigger village means more mats but I have workers set up to compensate for that. What happened?

[Winter's Embers]

Storage space is limited to 180 spaces in each storage. For wood storage, this is for ALL wood products. Logs, planks, sticks, firewood, coal, straw, bamboo. Once you reach that 180 limit, all production beyond that is wasted and lost. Part of the challenge here is to make sure you have as little overage as possible in all Needs categories and you set up production to the minimum needed to meet them. You are going through what many other people are going through: over-production.
You need to start storing non-Needs-based wood storage products in Tawara Bags on a shed. You have to go through each season and rearrange your storage to make sure items used for Needs are at the top and that there is no other item that is necessary in there. Then you need to manage your production to stay within that 180 space limit.

One major piece of advice for now: always ensure you have enough coal in your storage to meet the Heating needs of the coming season and rearrange each season to move coal to the top. Until the priority system is in place, you're going to have to be proactive every season.

The storage system and the removal priority of items is currently being worked on but it is still in flux and doesn't work quite right for these high-end populations. I've done three saves with max population and, while I can get all 7 Needs on a positive balance (at orange-level satisfaction), it takes effort for items, coal especially since the game stores firewood before coal and is thus used before coal, throwing your entire production chain into chaos.

Also, please note that there is a common misconception concerning happiness and productivity. The misconception is that you must maintain 'green-smiley' every season. You do not. Each person only needs one season at green level on all needs to reach maximum happiness. Orange-smiley MAINTAINS happiness, it does not set it. Once you get all your people to 135% (7 needs at green-smiley for one season) you can safely set the needs slider for all 7 needs and maintain that 135% productivity for as long as you can meet the orange-level demand.

[NeuroPandas]

This is fantastic information. thank you! I wasn't aware of the limit and thought that by having multiple storage bins that it would just keep adding spaces.

[NeuroPandas]

Originally posted by Winter's Embers:

Also, please note that there is a common misconception concerning happiness and productivity. The misconception is that you must maintain 'green-smiley' every season. You do not. Each person only needs one season at green level on all needs to reach maximum happiness. Orange-smiley MAINTAINS happiness, it does not set it. Once you get all your people to 135% (7 needs at green-smiley for one season) you can safely set the needs slider for all 7 needs and maintain that 135% productivity for as long as you can meet the orange-level demand.

This is good to know too. Ive set it up that it was reaching the green smile level each season. Now I'll adjust for this instead and should be able to maintain that easier.

[Winter's Embers]

Yeah. When I recruit new villagers, I run the map gathering the 6-9 that appear each season. I do that once, make sure I have enough for orange level for that season, advance and repeat until I reach my current maximum. Each season, you can assign people to gather the items you'll need for the big push. I usually use Excellent Meat Meal (rice, meat, oil, and garlic), Tea (grown in spring on land), Coal, Clay (switch to planks when fully staffed to automate rather than gather yourself), Mosquito Repellent, Short Bows, and Warrior Monk clothes. One season at 35 population is a real pain but it's doable if you've been a good squirrel and stocked up (especially on coins since you can buy up quite a bit of stuff in the NPC villages). After that one very difficult season at green, it's all smooth sailing on orange.